Canadians and Culture; or, Taxes, Money, Prestige, Ordinary Folk, Subsidized Whiners, and All the Rest

Abstract

IN THE MIDST OF THE RECENTLY-HELD FEDERAL ELECTION Campaign, the Hamilton Spectator published an editorial cartoon (14 September 2008) commenting on the debate generated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to cut $45 million in funding to the arts. The cartoon shows an artist wearing a white smock sitting in front of a nearly completed canvas, paintbrush poised to add the finishing touches to what we recognize as Tom Thomson's iconic The jack Pine (1916-17). He looks over his shoulder toward us in surprise, suddenly realizing that he has been exposed to the scrutiny of Spec's readers; to his right standing beside his canvas, we find NDF leader Jack Layton, whose speech bubble looms over the painting: Think of how much better your stuff could've been if only you had champions of federal funding for the arts there to support you. The cartoon makes what appears to be a simple enough assertion: government funding for culture--here imagined mainly as money directed toward individual artists--has no relation to the quality or value of the that is produced. The very idea that activities like painting should receive federal funds (always imagined in the form of tax dollars, that is, as money you are supposed to envision as siphoned directly out of your pocket) is seen as ludicrous--an idea that only the money-wasting left (or the NDP, which might not be the same thing) could possibly support. Government funds are better spent on other, more important things. Tom Thomson didn't need cash from Ottawa to help him get his dots and strokes down on canvas, and yet he still managed to leave a significant body of work for subsequent generations to gaze at and admire. It doesn't take much work to complicate and question this easy appeal to Canadian thriftiness and the assumptions on which it is premised. Where to start? There is, first, the interesting connection made between money and value. If money corrupts, it would seem that government money corrupts absolutely. Since artists have to eat, too, the point must be that only private funds can produce real aesthetic or cultural value, although one suspects that the cartoon is pushing the more radical claim that art and money should never mix: artists gain in spiritual growth what they lose from their bank accounts--or their waistlines. It is clear as well that aesthetic value is imagined as an objective characteristic that adheres to cultural objects and, which once so established, does so for time immemorial. The idea that value is produced by a whole apparatus of cultural institutions (museums and universities, critics and adjudicators of state funding programs--all government supported) and is thus an historical and cultural characteristic rather than an ontological one is bound to exceed the explanatory sophistication of an argument that starts from the assumption that money can't do a thing for the arts. If these points might seem too highfalutin to pose in a cartoon, then one could fall back on more empirical claims. The purchase of an early Thomson painting by the National Gallery of Canada in 1914 played an essential role in convincing the artist to continue his work: no government cash, then perhaps no droopy pine trees. And the place of his work in the national historical art canon cannot be disassociated from the decisions made by government-funded museums and galleries to collect his work and to make it available for public viewing, discussions of his work by government-funded art historians, the publications of books about early twentieth-century Canadian art with the help of government subventions ... you get the point. In the wake of the 2008 federal election, this Readers' Forum explores the multiple ways in which we talk about the role and function of the arts and in Canada, especially how we talk about them publicly and in relation to the role of governments in providing support for them. The latest Canadian variant of the culture wars proved incredibly frustrating, mainly because it seemed to travel the same old path to nowhere. …